Booz Allen Hamilton’s Push Into Online Education

In the wake of former Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden’s revelation about the NSA’s massive surveillance scheme, I’ve started to wonder what else this strange company has been up to. A lot, it turns out.

Partnering with institutions like Farleigh Dickinson University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton @ Work program, Booz Allen has apparently been a major force in the shove towards internet-based education. This is particularly significant when we take into account that they’ve also worked alongside the NSA to monitor and record virtually all communications and exchanges over the net and our phones.

I’ll leave you with this quote from a Booz Allen position paper on “Effectiveness and Efficiency: Reimagining Government,” which makes clear how Booz Allen sees online education as a strategic surveillance tool and the current climate of budget cuts as the perfect time to prey:

The aging workforce and record budget deficits require an end to business as usual…a window of opportunity to enact transformative change.

Continuous monitoring mitigates costly security risks. Best practices are increasingly shared among agency CIOs, so they can be built into new technologies and solutions. In fact, the collaborative model is the basis for how DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] is building out its cybersecurity guidance: Academic institutions, agencies, and CIOs are sharing insights on cyber practices that are evaluated for government-wide adoption.

they’re taking advantage of Uncle Homeland’s handouts
to edumacation corporations
while taking advantage of the opportunity to snoop for Uncle Homeland

another double dip payday for the Carlyle Group

Michael Gacillos O’Hair

DoD and the entire IC are really into computer-based training for a while now. Not new. What’s new are the refresher courses whenever a crisis springs up, which seem new but are the standard course of action when such things happen. That’s just the normal knee-jerk reaction of almost every corporate organization in the 21st century.